Robert R. Holt – författare

Volume one of this comprehensive approach to one of Freud''s most important conceptual achievements, the theory of thinking, examines the emergence and changes in his conceptions of primary and secondary process thought in their theoretical and clinical contexts. Unlike most treatments, which emphasize their embeddedness in metapsychology, the text demonstrates the empirical grounding of these concepts in observation and describes how it led to a method of quantitative measurement. A summary of major, theoretically relevant findings with that method, plus a critical review of post-Freudian reexaminations of primary process, leads to a reformulation of the psychoanalytic theory of thinking that is, in Rubinstein''s term, protoneurophysiological: as consistent as possible with contemporary knowledge in the brain sciences. In so doing, the author attempts to convert a psychoanalytic theory into a set of testable propositions using objectively quantifiable, scientific concepts. Moreover, he shows how data obtained with his method can be used to confront the theoretical propositions, verifying some, rejecting some, and significantly modifying others.Volume two is an enclosed compact disc. The first ten chapters constitute a detailed scoring manual, designed to be self-teaching, for applying the concepts of primary process, its controls and defenses, to data from the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Tests, dreams, and free verbal data. The remaining chapters treat its reliability and validity, including a critical summary of over one hundred researches from around the world, demonstrating how it can be used not only to test psychoanalytic propositions but to illuminate issues in clinical psychiatry, clinical and developmental psychology, and personality. A concluding chapter points to many promising directions for further research.

I do not think of myself as primarily interested in method, but in the substance of psychology. Nevertheless, our discipline has such difficulties in coming to grips with its substance that I have found myself getting involved in fww to do it persistently and since the beginning of my career. That career has been divided between diagnosis and research, the balance between them swinging gradually from the former to the latter. To the astonishment of many of my students and colleagues, I have never become a psychotherapist nor a psychoanalyst, though I have looked closely over the shoulders of many friends at their work, have attended continuous case seminars, and have participated in research on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis enough to feel that I have a pretty good grasp of what that kind of endeavor is like. So I have been writing about method, diagnostic and investigative, for over 25 years, and was happy to accept the suggestion of Seymour Weingar­ ten, of Plenum Press, that I publish a collection of these papers. What has ended up as two volumes was originally conceived as one, for I feel that there is more similarity of method in assessment, prediction, and research than appears on the surface. The General Introduction and Chapter 1 of Volume 1 state the point of view of the entire work.